Time to Grow Up

So maybe being 35 it might be time for me to start thinking about growing up.

I don’t mean getting stodgy or conservative or saying things like, “because we have always done it that way” but I mean giving up some of the tactics that I honed at a young age to survive the wilds of Junior High that might not be so appropriate anymore.  You see in Junior High I was picked on mercilessly by some of the guys (who my teachers assured me were only doing it because they were threatened by me- fat lot of consolation that was when I would go home crying every day). My survival strategy became to be as cool as possible. Luckily I had an older sister who through osmosis I could learn from and start to take on the ways of the cool rebel kids. I shaved the sides and back of my hair, wore dark lipstick and high top skater shoes.

It has served me well over the years. Although I took all honors and AP classes in high school, I escaped nerdom, played sports, and once I hit 9th grade never got picked on again. In college, I had fun, did what I wanted and took on my career fearlessly. I was not usually intimidated by a room full of senior engineers once I got to NASA because, hey, they were not nearly as cool as me. Heck I even created a whole space holiday around being cool.

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Welcome to 2010

So if there is one thing I have learned it is that the future doesn’t just come. It has to be built, dream by dream, gadget by gadget, conversation by conversation.

I got over the disappointment of 2000, the 2000 I had been waiting for since I was about 8. No flying cars, no exclusively silver wardrobes, no weekend trips to space. But what I took away was a resolve to get everyone excited not just about The Future but about being part of the group of people who are building the future. That is who we are. Never forget that. We are the music makers and the dreamers of dreams. We are the architects of a future for our species that inspires us. We build because we can, because it is our favorite game. It is not a better game than the players of the sports games, or the money game or even the video game. It is merely the one that we find the most fun. (So let’s play!)

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Space: What’s NOT to Hope for?

At the NASA tweet-up down at the Kennedy Space Center for the STS-129 launch a reporter asked me a question that really threw me. Here, a week later, I’m still thinking about it. He asked:

“Do you think bringing tweeters here gives NASA hope for the future.”

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Engaging JSC’s Next Gen: A Leadership Analysis

A little over 18 months ago, a group of about 30 young professionals at JSC were assembled in a conference room off-site and tasked with developing their own vision for the Center, as well as an associated strategic plan (1 year) to get closer to realizing this vision, over the course of a 2-day workshop. A response to the Gen Y Perspectives presentation that previously made the rounds within the agency, the JSC 20-Year Vision development effort was specifically designed to engage young professionals at the center and allow them to provide their own perspective of where they collectively hoped to see the Center in 20 years.

The team recognized at the end of those two days that its task was daunting enough to need extra work, and so the team members set out to accomplish their task. The result, after a little over a month of diligent work, outlined their vision for the JSC of 2028 and provided 5 suggestions of “immediately” implementable ideas that would, in the end, help realize this vision (presentation can be found in the Documents section of this website).
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Space Invaders in Nation’s Capitol

Crazy week at NASA. Space Shuttle Discovery completed her cross-country piggy-back ride from California back to Florida. We announced the discovery of water on the Moon…and more on Mars. The 2009 Astronaut Class and the STS-127 crew came to visit NASA Headquarters in Washington DC. We hosted a Tweet-up with Space Tweeps and the STS-127 crew. (Thanks all you Space Tweeps who joined us!)
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Go Boldly!

Given the uncertainty surrounding the direction of the human space exploration program these days, a group of young professionals here at JSC assembled with the guidance and support of the Bay Area Houston Economic Partnership and local aerospace executives to begin an advocacy campaign and get the word out on why we think human spaceflight is important.

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A response to Mr. Augustine’s questions

The Augustine Commission met in Houston on Tuesday to review the human space flight program, particularly Dr. Sally Ride’s subcommittee’s work, and get the public’s reaction.  Here’s mine to two questions Mr. Augustine himself posed.

He asked:
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Launch Scrubbed, but Go to Post

So an hour ago, I showed up at the ISS Mission Evaluation Room to watch the shuttle launch. Last night, a friend of mine was asking me if I was going to get up at 6 AM to watch the launch. I wasn’t that enthusiastic about doing it, but realized that I had to option to go into my console in the MER and not only watch it on a nice big flat screen but I could also hear the other voice loops beyond PAO and CAPCOM if I watched it in the MER and used my headset.

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Gerstenmaier On Multi-Tasking

NASA has some strong leadership, and among the top of those ranks, is Bill Gerstenmaier. Gerstenmaier is the Associate Administrator for Space Operations and is the point man who directs NASA’s human exploration of space. Today at the Project Management Challenge, he gave a really great talk entitled “Thinking on the Job: Distractions, Multitasking, and the Erosion of Attention.”  I posted my notes on the #PMC2009 blog, but thought I’d do the same here.  Multi-tasking, or continuous partial attention, has been a subject that has came up quite a bit lately.  Psychologists have experimented on the nature and limits of human multitasking and shown that multitasking is not as workable as concentrated times.  Still, our increasingly complex, and information overloaded world, almost seems to demand it (or at least that’s the perception).  It’s a problem we all share to some extent or another.  I think Gerstenmaier offers some really invaluable insight into the subject so I wanted to share my notes with everyone.  Oh, and Gerst, if you are reading this, I loved your slides! 

Disclaimer: I multi-tasked and wrote this on my blackberry during his presentation.  

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ACDC Rock

So for quite some time now I have seen the Lunar Lander as the project of choice that I see myself working on in my career in the mid-term.  I have been getting familiar with the Constellation architecture since ESAS was released, and I am hitting the workforce at the Altair sweet spot. Plus, working at Boeing, Orion is out. Ares rockets don’t really get my blood going as much as the lander either.

Sometime during fall of last year, I was perusing the AIAA library and I came upon a paper that some Boeing guys had published in conjunction with the NASA Altair Broad Area Announcement (BAA) regarding the trade space for the physical configuration of the Altair vehicle. There were half a dozen Boeing authors, and one of them happened to be in Houston.

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